AKICIDW: Fixing a cranky external hard drive

[carbonel]

I have a 3Tb external hard drive that's about half full. Unfortunately, something has gone wrong with it. When I tried to run the Windows error checking utility, it ran for quite a while, then hung.

I can see all the files, but a lot of them just return error messages or do nothing if I try to copy them. There's nothing critical if I can't recover the disk (it's mostly audiobooks and videos), but I don't have a backup.

Is there some better utility that you can recommend that will fix the drive and salvage what can be salvaged?

Comments

Clone

[lsanderson]

The next step would be to clone the drive. I have hardware that can do that. Then you send file recovery software after the drive. Then, in my experience, you take a hammer to the bad drive and smash it to smithereens because you've just wasted a bunch of time. I have software for file recovery as well, but I am not in love with it.

Re: Clone

[carbonel]

I'm not entirely clear on what you're saying here. Are you saying that it's a foolish endeavor that one can waste a lot of time on, or that the data can probably be recovered from the bad drive but I shouldn't try to reuse it after that?

If the latter, could I bring over the bad drive and a (presumed) good new drive and have you take a try at them?

Re: Clone

[lsanderson]

If it's of great value, I can clone the drive and send Auslogic's File Recovery software after it to see what it can save.

My personal experience after losing several drive partitions was that it's not a good use of time, but I have off-site backup, so I restored the information from Backblaze.

If you want to drop off the drives, I can clone it using hardware and send the software out to see what it can recover.

I would have to take any drive enclosure off to use the drive dock to clone it. Otherwise, I'd have to try other software cloning solutions.